Page 124 of Dirty Rock

“The guys and I were on the road at that point. It was… shit, 1994, I think. We’d finished a gig in Cambridge, and we were heading towards Kettering in the middle of the night. I needed to take a piss, and the tour bus toilet was broken. I’d been drinking. We all had. I got the driver in a headlock ‘cause the bastard wouldn’t pull over. That made him slam the brakes on and listen. He pulled up behind this car. I barely saw it. It was dark, and the lights were off. I went to take a piss in the bushes at the side of the road, and when I pulled my zipper back up and turned around… bam. A pair of wide brown eyes were staring at me over the ledge of the window. Just this nose and those damn eyes.”

“Julia,” I breathed.

“Yeah, my baby Jules.” Bobby cleared his throat, the memory obviously painful. “She’s seven minutes older than Sarah in body. Her heart, though… that girl was born with a fifty-year-old’s heart. When I looked around for the parents, there weren’t any. That woman they used to call a mother had literally left her kids in the middle of nowhere. When I opened the car door and asked who they were, Jules wrapped herself around Sarah and told me to step back.” A soft, sad smile tugged at the edge of his mouth. “Do you know what she said to me?”

“What?”

“She said ‘Mr, I know karate. I’ll kick you in the nuts if I have to. I’m not afraid. I’m never afraid.’She sure was afraid, all right. She just wouldn’t show it to a stranger like me.”

I couldn’t smile at the idea of my woman being young and terrified, no matter how much I admired that strength. “So, you just took them home?”

“Home?” He scoffed. “I didn’t have one of those. The road was all I knew, but I couldn’t leave those girls, and something about Julia’s bravery drew me to her. I wasn’t her real pops, and I never wanted to be a dad, but…” He sighed again, speaking to me like he’d known me for three decades already. “I couldn’t let her go.”

“I can’t either,” I admitted.

“Even though we both know it would be better for her in the long run,” Bobby added.

Would it? Would it be better for her to have someone else instead of me and this manic life I lived? Someone away from the cameras. Someone who wouldn’t play everything out in front of the media.

My fucking heart sank at the thought of giving her up.

“Did your family accept her? Take her in?” I asked, my throat dry. I couldn’t get the visuals of a little girl, perhaps somewhat dirty and uncared for, staring into the eyes of a rock god and telling him she wasn’t afraid to hurt him.

“The only family I ever had was the band and those girls.”

“No one else?” I scowled, trying to imagine the loneliness that would bring. Not temporary, fake loneliness like I’d imagined I’d been in just a few weeks or months ago. I mean the kind of lonely where there’s no one waiting at the other end of life for you to go back home to. Even when I’d been a selfish, unbearable arsehole, I’d always had Ma, Caleb, and Cookham to return to.

“Nope.” Bobby shook his head. “She didn’t, either. My bandmates became hers and Sarah’s family. I was the main guy, sure, but they all chipped in. Julia was breaking up our arguments and figuring shit out for us from the moment I dropped her on the bus and said, ‘Welcome to the world of rock ‘n’ roll.’”

“And it worked?”

“Yeah, you know why? Because the lonely seek the lonely. The grieving seek the grieving. The desperate seek the desperate. The sad seek the sad. Together, we found each other… in the craziest of circumstances. We were always meant to be a unit.”

What made you come to me?

I was sad…I knew you were sad, too.

The conversation we’d had came back to me, flashing through my mind like bright, white lightning over a dark and empty piece of mind.

“Shit,” was the only response I could give. I was Rhett Ryan. The singer, the sarcastic motherfucker. The comedian. The deep and meaningful stuff had never come easy, but I suddenly wanted to find Julia, wrap my arms around her, squeeze her tight and ask her if she was okay.

I wanted to offer her pity when what she probably needed from me was silence. None of us liked to live in our pasts, especially not me.

“I need to find her,” I said, no longer completely enamoured by Bobby Hart.

“Rhett?”

“What?”

“We’ve kept all of this a secret from the world for twenty-six years.” He eyed me, the warning clear.

“I won’t tell a soul.”

I wouldn’t. I couldn’t give a shit about the gossip or the scandal. I just needed to speak to Julia. For what reason, I wasn’t sure yet. I was a little pissed she hadn’t told me, but I knew from experience and our time together that shouting at or accusing her of shit did nothing but make her shut down again.

I’m not afraid. I’m never afraid

Yet she’d told me she was scared of what we had.

---